You don't usually see people ( including me!) talk about their mistakes openly. But I think it is good to think about the mistakes we made in the past, so that we don't commit the same errors in the future. I've been a professional programmer for about 5 years now. Like anyone else, I made mistakes along my way. Usually I didn't recognize the wrong thing I did right away; I only knew about the mistakes after being exposed to the correct ways of doing things. Hopefully after reading this post you would draw something useful from it and won't make the mistakes ( and pay the same price) as I did.

Performance and standards look like dominating work on Microsoft's next version of Internet Explorer. As ever with Microsoft, though, it's likely to be the former that not just trips up the latter but that also continues to sour Microsoft's relationship with the rest of the industry.

Linux has failed to win either mind share or market share on the desktop. Google’s Chrome OS will do little to change that. Learn why.

Nice review of logging frameworks for Java.

Everyone has had an interview that didn't go as well as it should have. Luckily, there are things you can do before, during and after an interview to ensure that your mistakes can be avoided or negated.

In an ideal world, each big subject from the software development process would be handed to a specialized professional: UI designers, programmers, architects, database administrators etc. Unfortunately, this is not the case most of times. There a plenty of cases out there where projects suffer from lack of proper expertise and well trained people

The following is a list of the language features I miss most when programming Java, the list includes descriptions about Closures, Modules, and so on.

Test-Driven Development, or TDD, is often quoted as an essential Agile best practice, and so it is. It works wonders on green-fields projects and new code bases where you can start afresh and ensure that all your code is both easily testable and well tested. But what about legacy code? (By legacy code, I mean any code that does not have a comprehensive set of automated tests, so you might be writing legacy code as we speak).

I have attended a presentation by Simon Guest from Microsoft on their cloud computing architecture. Although there was no new concept or idea introduced, Simon has provided an excellent summary on the major patterns of doing cloud computing. I have to admit that I am not familiar with Azure and this is my first time hearing a Microsoft cloud computing presentation. I felt Microsoft has explained their Azure platform in a very comprehensible way. I am quite impressed. Simon talked about 5 patterns of Cloud computing. Let me summarize it (and mix-in a lot of my own thoughts) ...

This Google is made from 100% Virgin pulp (What the heck?). After getting a look and feel of Google Chrome OS virtually, now you can actually feel Google physically by using toilet paper. A blogger from Vietnam has posted in his blog the picture of Google brand toilet paper which is being sold in Vietnam. Did Marissa Mayer design the wrapper of this toilet paper . I don’t really know. But when translating the text on the wrapper it goes like this Very long, soft, smooth. Of high vaccum, because you always. So, Next is What?

Lots of people confuse “test first methodologies” with TDD, it is very common to listen comments like “TDD is just about writing your tests first”, which are completely wrong, these kind of affirmations are not describing TDD at all, they are talking about test first development.

Not too long ago Google announced their new experimental, open source, system language which was said to be a mix of Python and C called Go. Immediately the internet super highway’s lights lit up and the news spread like wild fire. Comments came from all over and besides the news that another language with the same name already existed, the enthusiasm did not let up. Writing the odd ‘Hello Go’ program or dabbling with the syntax is all well and good but, until you sit down and write something a tad more useful, you do not really get to know whether a new language holds any promise. I learned about a Twitter client written in Go and asked it’s author Dmitry Chestnykh to share his experience.